World Heritage Site

I have added a new page in the Community Statistics section. It’s called ‘TWHS Masters’ and shows results based on Tentative Site visits as logged by our community members. I have written about TWHS before in the post “The Value of a TWHS”, where I argued that visiting TWHS is a waste of time with a success rate of 14% ever being promoted to WHS. But of course, you can visit them based on their own merits or use them to spice up your itinerary in a country.

Most TWHS visited

We start with the simple math of who has ‘ticked’ the highest number of TWHS. For this ranking it’s important to keep in mind that a considerable number of members have not logged their TWHS count: 5 from the Top 10 and 3 more from the Top 20.

Roman is the winner here. He clearly beat #2 with 80 sites. It’s the result of his long-term goal to revisit all countries one by one, covering all provinces and all WHS and TWHS as far as possible. 

Some do significantly better on TWHS than on WHS, which can be seen in the overall WHS ranking displayed after their name: Christoph is 9th on TWHS and 81st on WHS, while Tony0001 is 12th on TWHS and 95th on WHS. Asked for an explanation, Tony replied that he focuses on the highlights of the region he is about to visit first and does not do trips to only cover a single WHS. Christoph points out the European countries such as Romania, Malta and Cyprus which have much more TWHS than WHS, causing the disbalance when you continue (re)visiting places in Europe. Neither of them has a specific focus on TWHS though.

Some others do significantly worse regarding TWHS than WHS, notably I do! For me, it has been a strategic choice in the past years to put my time and money first towards WHS. Other factors are my relatively low country count and maybe being more conservative in ticking because I know more about the individual TWHS having updated their pages for years.

The photo below shows New York's Central Park - the most visited TWHS (331 out of 657 members have been there).

Most TWHS across countries

Thomas holds the #1 spot, having visited TWHS in 132 countries (versus WHS in 151). It shows the width of his travels and the role (T)WHS have played in it for a long time.

The names in this list are fairly similar to those in Visited WHS in Most Countries, except those who haven’t logged their TWHS visits. What does stand out is that, overall, people have visited TWHS in some 30 countries less than where they have visited WHS, although there are 181 "countries" with a Tentative List and only 168 with inscribed sites. 

So the pattern seems to be:

1. visited country but not a WHS (the top-ranked all have visited 160 - 193 countries)
2. visited country and at least 1 WHS (-40 countries)
3. visited country and at least 1 TWHS (-30 countries)

I consider myself more of a specialist (WHS focus only), and the decline is less steep (137 visited countries, 133 with a WHS, 104 with a TWHS). I expect that Atila and Zoë will have similar, gradual patterns.

Ratio

The ratio ranking shows the number of TWHS visited divided by the number of WHS visited. These members come close to having visited as many TWHS as WHS. This can be due to a strong regional focus where not many WHS are available (I am thinking of North America), so they spend their weekends visiting TWHS whereas in Europe they'd visit WHS. 

Only members with over 100 WHS visited are included due to anomalies in the lower regions. It turned out for example that Schnitzel has visited 114 times more WHS than TWHS. He really can’t be bothered!

Combi 

We can also add the TWHS totals to the WHS totals, though that feels weird to me as this implies that they are worth the same (which portrays them as random 'things to tick' and strays too far from what WHS are all about). So I have included a ranking where WHS visits versus TWHS visits are weighed 3:1.

Rarely visited

Roman also stands out among the obscure TWHS, another result of his methodical approach. He has been to 166 out of the 801 TWHS that have been visited by 6 members or less. Recently he was the first to have been to the Cekeen Tumulus in Senegal, for example (Photo 3).

The number 2 has ‘only’ 62. Good scorers beyond the usual names here are Afshin Iranpour (a master of Iran's extensive Tentative List) and Christravelblog (he really did his best in the UAE and Djibouti).

Upcoming nominations

Here I present a similar prognosis to the 'armchair ticks' that may be expected in 2025, 2026 and 2027 combined. However, it also includes TWHS that are on the radar beyond 2027. 

I also checked whether a difference can be found among visits to recent TWHS (since 2010) versus older TWHS (which may have less chance of getting ever inscribed). But there is no real difference, if people visit TWHS they cover both old and new.

Are there any other data points you’d like to see about TWHS visits? Or do you have any additional observations looking at this stats page?